Around November 24, 1851

In April of 1851, a fugitive slave case involving a black man by the name of Sydney was decided in the Knox County Circuit Court. Sydney's counsel argued that he was a free black man born in Tennessee, whom at an unspecified date was kidnapped and smuggled across the state line to Alabama. There, he was subsequently sold into bondage. The case arose when Sydney escaped from his master and returned...

The Maryland General Assembly of 1852 was overtaken by an anti-Catholic fervor that produced a series of laws intended to insult and restrict the rising Catholic immigrant population from Ireland. A prohibition on the sale of liquor was imposed as one of the first acts of the General Assembly. Irish immigrants were not only some of the most frequent customers of liquor stores, but had increasingly...

On May 3rd three members of the Bartle family were brutally murdered by an Italian man who had worked the Bartle's fields. Accounts stated that there was an altercation the week prior to the murder between Bartle and the Italian worker over wages he felt he deserved. The family members killed were all struck in the head with a blunt object and were all found in a gruesome manner<br />Events...

The Macon and Western Railroad adopted a new policy in 1851 which prohibited all black people, regardless of their freed or enslaved status, from boarding any train unless they could prove the legitimacy of their travel. All African Americans had to have a written pass issued by the individual's owner or trustee. The office and the conductor both required a copy of it, and if the office was...

When reading novels from nineteenth century, one often sees an overbearing mother whose only joy in life is finding suitable matches for her infinite number of daughters. In these stories, the daughter does not normally have much, if any, say as to whom she will wed. On Tuesday October 25, 1851, Mary Jane Boggs Holladay of Virginia was busy in preparation for her marriage. She was confronted with...

NEW EDITION OF DR WEISSELHOFF'S SCIENTIFIC WORK ON THE SUBJECT OF CHILD-BIRTH screamed an ad in Lexington's The Valley Star. The proclamation, which ran on Thursday, February 26, 1849, advertised a new book containing insights into birth control. Years before John Stuart Mill and his wife handed out condoms in a London subway, this paper in a small Virginia town danced around the issue a...

As a sociable southerner, one expected certain attributes from you: manners, dress that suited your means, Christianity. Although Mary Jane Holladay wrote in her diary that it was her constant prayer that she should be able to please her husband and have a loving marriage, she was quite anxious when it came to religion. In her opinion, it was better to spend time wrestling with and testing her faith...

In 1851, a journalist put into words an ideology that would start a new trend in urban development. He proposed the construction of a huge public park that would "be enjoyed by thousands of all classes, without distinction." The ideals of Romanticism and the Republican view of the importance of nature were at a peak among educated Americans at this time and this commentator proposed a way to manifest...

All that John Gornith heard as he stood tied to an oak tree in the Virginia woods was the crack of the whip. In 1851, the Vigilance Committee of Grayson County, Virginia arrested Gornith for spreading abolitionist propaganda. The Committee forced Gornith, a friend of an Ohio abolitionist, to renounce his abolitionist sentiments and leave the state, but not before tying him to a tree to "receive...

It was an odd thing to see so many people gathered on the balcony of the Jones Hotel at four in the morning. Fire bells rang as half-dressed people wearily watched the horizon glow a soft orange for the fifth time in eighteen months.[1] San Francisco may have been a “cloth and board” city, with no advanced water system – a tinderbox, but suspicions mounted as the Great Fire of May 4, 1851,...